Sales figures

The original iPad started strongly, selling 300,000 on the opening weekend, 3.27m in the first quarter, then 32m in Apple’s fiscal year 2011. Because it’s a consumer device, iPad sales always spike in the US winter holiday quarter, and on the release of iPad Air and iPad mini 2 in November 2013 reached an all–time high of more than 26m in the quarter. Apple stopped reporting sales numbers at the end of 2018, but a total of more than 400m iPads have been sold since launch.

Proportionally, iPad accounted for 26% of Apple’s total global revenue in Q3 2012, but since this high point other segments have grown more strongly than iPad; in Q4 2019 it was under 11%. Thanks to a refresh in 2018–19 though, the second quarter of 2019 saw the strongest growth in six years, with iPad revenue up 22% to $21.3bn. If iPad were a company in its own right, it would rank at number 147 in the Fortune 500.